Recent English Poetry – 1 171and in all these respects he would have been recognised as not
only equal but superior to many who have enjoyed in their
own day the reputation of poets of the first rank. That he is
not so recognised is due to the inferior form, a form legitimate
enough for lesser uses, but not easily capable of the greatest
poetic effects. Whitman too for all his energy loses in this way;
even his greatest things do not go absolutely and immediately
home, or having entered they do not so easily seize on the soul,
take possession and rest in a calm, yet vibrating mastery. The
real poetic cadence has that power, and to make the full use of
it is the sign of the greatest masters; it has in it then something
magical, immediate and miraculous, an unanalysable triumph
of the spirit. But this other movement has not that stamp, it
does only a little more than a highly concentrated prose might
do, and this is because of the three indispensable intensities
of poetry it may have intensity of thought and soul-substance,
intensity of expression, but the intensity of rhythm, which is
poetry’s primal need, is lowered and diluted, — even, one feels,
to a certain extent in its choric movements: by that lowering
the two other intensities suffer, the poet himself tends to loosen
them to the level of his movement. If that is so, those who use
the form to meet the demands of the new age, are on the wrong
track. But a demand is there and it indicates a real need. It is
evident that Whitman and Carpenter could not have expressed
themselves altogether in the existing forms, even if they had
made the attempt. But if the new age is to express itself with the
highest poetical power, it must be by new discoveries within
the principle of the intenser poetical rhythm. The recent or
living masters may not have done this, though we may claim
that some beginnings have been made, but the new age is only
at its commencement; the decisive departures, the unforeseen
creations may yet be due which will equip it with an instrument
or many instruments suited to the largeness, depth and subtlety
of the coming spirit.